It's Lent, officially, so let me confess my shortcomings: I can't help but hate seeing those Trump signs still out along the highway. Three months and more have passed since the election. Trump lost. Please, take down the signs?
People love him, I know. There are those--and they are legion--who see him as a savior sent to deliver us from the blood-sucking cabal that runs a sex trafficking ring out of a Washington D. C. pizza parlor. Maybe the signs are still there to help Trump remember his unfinished business--I don't know.
But for most of us, the signs and flags should go. It's over. It's cold, I know, and maybe whoever owns them doesn't have tall enough snow boots or a warm enough jacket to trudge out there and get them, but it's time.
Mine is a minority view. The tally went like this: Donald Trump: Lyon County, 5,703 votes (83.17 percent); O’Brien County, 5,857 votes (77.73 percent); Osceola County, 2,688 votes (80.84 percent); Sioux County, 15,669 votes (82.72 percent). I know, I know--you're saying, "what the heck is wrong with O'Brien County?"
Of that eighty-some percent, many, I'm sure, hold dearly to the belief that the liberal Dems cheated. CNN did a poll mid-January that found three out of every four Republicans still believed in "the big lie," that Donald J. got robbed because, after all, everybody knows--especially the liberal Dems--that the Orange Man won in a landslide.
I just hope the rest of us aren't destined to see Trump signs for the next four years, when, once again, the savior will return from his Mara Lago hacienda and rise to run again. Why junk those signs now? people say. Soon enough, the old rallies will start again anew. He'll drop once more from some elevator in the sky.
The Big Lie is just that, so say sixty court cases, all the way up to the Supremes. Trump lost, 306 to 232 in the Electoral College; in the popular vote, he lost by seven million votes. Let me write that out: 7,000,000.
All fake news, Trumpsters say, because Trumpsters trot out alternative facts that prove vote tallies in Milwaukee, Atlanta, Detroit, Philadelphia, and Pittsburgh--places with majority populations of minority status--were phony and shouldn't have been counted because if all those people of color hadn't voted, America would be blessed with another four years of The Donald. He got robbed. The election was rigged. Stacy Abrams is the devil. Black people voted.
Not in my lifetime did we come so close to losing representative democracy as we did on January 6. What Trump wanted his massive crowd of disciples to do was interrupt the official determination of election results. He didn't want Mike Pence to do what every VP is required to--announce the election results and name the next President because it wouldn't be him. Democracy was just about dumped.
It's Lent, so let's be truthful about the human condition. Democracy is a stretch. As Ben Franklin said, it's not easy. I might wish that only those who love Henry David Thoreau could vote, only English majors maybe. Others would say only those who come from straight-talking small towns, or women who attend Bible Studies. Here, in northwest Iowa, most would much prefer that voting privileges be granted only to those who work as dang hard as we do. We all have our prejudices.
But democracy won't have it--"one nation, under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all." Not for some, but for all.
Biden won because 81,283,361 eligible American voters cast their ballots for him and 74,222,960 did so for the other guy. Them's the facts. Read 'em and weep.
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